I spoke with Tory Newmyer of the Washington Post‘s Finance 202 about the prospects of a bipartisan deal on infrastructure and the politics of how to pay for it:

“If the mutual will is there politically, then the funding will be there. If you can broker a deal in principle, the rest will work itself out,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist who lobbies on infrastructure issues. But he said cooperation could break down as a new set of House Democratic chairmen use their subpoena power to launch probes of the Trump administration. “How do you get there with this political cold war in the background?”

The president made the point in his post-election news conference. He said House Democrats could investigate him, “or we can work together. You can’t do them simultaneously, by the way.”

I spoke to Geof Koss of E&E News about the upcoming lame duck session of Congress and the odds of a tax title:

Also waiting in the wings is an assortment of expired energy tax incentives, including for biofuels, alternative vehicles and energy efficiency. There’s bipartisan support in both chambers for doing so, but House Republican leaders continue to resist longer extensions sought by congressional supporters (E&E Daily, Nov. 6).

Liam Donovan, a tax expert and Bracewell principal, said he expects some sort of tax package to emerge in the lame duck, but congressional appetite for tacking on a difficult fight over taxes to the year-end to-do list was unclear.

That would depend on the size and duration of the final spending omnibus. “Because once you crack the door for a tax title, everyone wants to get in,” he said last week, adding that taxes would likely resurface early in the next session of Congress.

I spoke with Elaina Plott of The Atlantic about the Texas Senate race and political miscalculations on both sides:

But in critiques of O’Rourke’s strategy, the deficiencies of his challenger—and the GOP as a whole—become just as clear. Texas may play host to mostly conservative voters, yes. But massive early-voting numbers and record turnout among minority demographics reveal that the state is shifting not so much in how its citizens decide to vote, but in who decides to show up. “A lot of the patterns last night were predictable,” the Republican strategist Liam Donovan told me. “It was the volume that caught everyone by surprise.” For Cruz, the blind spot was telling: His campaign based its electoral models on 6 million voters, far shy of the 8 million who ultimately turned up to vote. It’s the kind of miscalculation that, if replicated, could spell doom in the future for Republican candidates in Texas and beyond.

About Liam

Liam Donovan is frequent commentator and writer on national politics. In a previous life he spent four years working to elect a GOP majority to the United States Senate. He currently works in Washington, DC for a leading government relations and strategic communications firm.